Penn State extends first offers to priority Class of 2024 targets
Penn State basketball just wrapped a busy weekend. It began for head coach Micah Shrewsberry and staff on Thursday night with the kickoff reception for the Coaches vs. Cancer event, followed by the tournament Friday, and wrapped with a pair of major recruiting visits Saturday.
And by the end of the day, Penn State basketball extended its first three offers of the Class of 2024 cycle.
The visitors to campus on Saturday afternoon were center Matt Gilhool and forward Royce Parham. By the time they left their unofficial visits to check out the program, they each left with scholarship offers to play for Penn State.
A third scholarship offer, meanwhile, was issued to point guard Robert Wright III, of Philadelphia’s Neumann Goretti.
Penn State’s Class of 2024 recruiting priorities
For Gilhool, Penn State’s offer is his first to come in despite a rising profile. Set to transfer from Elizabethtown Area to Westtown School ahead of his junior season, the 6-foot-10 forward has been garnering attention on the summer hoops circuit. Other programs to reportedly show interest have included Virginia, Missouri, Rutgers, and Temple, among others.
Penn State’s other unofficial visitor of the weekend, Parham is a bit further along in the process. The offer comes on top of other reported offers from Robert Morris, Duquesne, Pitt, George Mason, and TCU for the 6-foot-9, North Hills, Pittsburgh, Pa. prospect. Parham is the son of former Penn State Lady Lion alumnus Kim Calhoun, who starred for former coach Rene Portland in the mid-90s.
And, though he didn’t make the trip to Penn State on Saturday, the Nittany Lions had one more piece of the puzzle to extend an official offer as part of its first push in the Class of 2024 cycle. Fast-rising sophomore point guard Robert Wright III added Penn State’s offer to a list that also includes high-profile programs Syracuse, Miami, Wake Forest, Kansas State, and Maryland, among others.
Next steps
Concurrent to its Class of 2024 recruiting efforts, Penn State will soon also get back to the matter of the task at hand. Welcoming seven new pieces to its personnel this summer, two graduate transfers and five true freshmen, Shrewsberry will look to improve on the program’s gritty 14-17 finish in his debut season at the helm.
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With a strong core of returning players in Jalen Pickett, Seth Lundy, Myles Dread, and Dallion Johnson, Shrewsberry said he’s looking forward to the opportunity to get the process started meshing old and new together.
“I can’t wait. I think it’s fun to get eight weeks,” he said of the start of the program’s summer workouts. “You know who you have, but you don’t know who you have until you get a chance to work with them. So we’re gonna spend the first few weeks just really getting to know them.
“What do they do best? You watch these guys so much, but they’re not in the setting that you want them to be in. So we get to put them in different situations, see how they react, see what happens, put them on different teams, put them in different situations and see what we can do from there.
“But I’m a basketball junkie, so going a really long time without practicing, working out and doing stuff on the court, that’s hard for me. So I’m itching to get back out there and put all these guys together. I’m excited about our group.”
Penn State’s transfers, Andrew Funk and Cam Wynter, are set to arrive June 11. The five Class of 2022 newcomers will come June 18.
